


Five Years and Twenty-Three Days

by Dredfulhapiness



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Spoilers
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-07
Updated: 2019-05-23
Packaged: 2020-02-27 12:12:37
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,377
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18738778
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dredfulhapiness/pseuds/Dredfulhapiness
Summary: After killing Thanos they all split off. The man from Brooklyn went back to New York. The mechanic moved to the country. The scientist went back to the lab. The king found a new land to rule. The double-crosser held down the fort.The archer was nowhere to be found.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is, in fact, spoilers for Endgame so, uh, beware. This will come out in chapters, and it'll go through the five years between the snap and Ant-Man getting released.

**23 Days**

The battle was anticlimactic. After a majority of their troops disintegrated there was nothing left for the Avengers to do. There was nothing left for them to fight. There were people to avenge, but no way to do it so they licked their wounds and regrouped.

For the first few days, no one changed out of their uniforms. They were all waiting for another attack, for another reason to suit up. That couldn’t have been it. There was too much left unspoken.

They helped Okoye take a headcount of Wakanda. They helped the wounded, gathered the troops, they cleaned the castle when there was no one left to help. They sat in silence when they realized their use had worn out. 

This wasn’t the first time the Avengers had been rendered stagnant, but it was the first time they didn’t know what to do with themselves in the downtime. 

“Any word on Tony?” Steve rubbed at his eyes. He sat across from Nat, but she only offered a sad smile.\

“We’re working on it. But if he’s out there…” she trailed off. He already knew the end of the sentence. He glanced at the corner of the room. Thor was still seething. He hadn’t stopped gripping Stormbreaker, running his hands along the handle, deep in thought. Rocket was looking at it, too, but with a different expression that Steve couldn’t piece together.

“What should we do now?” he asked. Banner sighed. Steve knew he shouldn’t be asking questions, he should be doling out orders and forming a plan, but he’d done that before and they’d… 

There’s only so many times you can watch your best friend die before you start questioning your leadership.

“Go home.” It was Nat that answered. Even Thor looked up at her. “We aren’t doing anything for Wakanda, and any supplies we might need are back in New York.”

The eyes turned to Steve. He was still the captain.

“New York it is,” he said. “We’ll leave at seventeen-hundred.”

* * *

Pepper met them at the front door. When she asked, “where’s Tony?” it hurt Steve’s chest to shake his head.

“We’re trying to figure that out,” he promised. “If he’s out there we’ll find him.”

Settling in wasn’t as easy as it had always been. For Steve, it was an entirely new building and this time Tony wasn’t there to walk him through it. There was no dramatic grand tour. No elaborate explanation of every electronic. 

The place felt a lot emptier. Everything Stark-branded felt out of place without a face to place alongside the name. It had been hard without Tony after the split, but Steve hadn’t been surrounded by him then. He’d been keeping a respectful distance. This time, he dealt with their divide and distance by turning to ask Tony something only to find the room empty. FRIDAY wasn’t the same as Jarvis.

Nat spent most of the time trying to get in touch with Clint. When that failed, over and over, she started working. She gathered census data, she contacted heads of government, she reached out to ever hero they knew of and took names of who had vanished. The numbers were grim. They had lost more people than they saved. In terms of superheroes, the numbers had been split by more than half. 

Thor spent most of his time silent. Rocket tried to talk him out of it to no avail. Steve knew it was something he should try to fix, but he wasn’t sure how. How do you tell someone that they need to stop blaming themselves when you can’t even come to terms with it yourself? How do you say, “It’s not just your fault. It’s all of our faults” without blaming them.

Thor had lost more than most of them, so Steve let him be angry.

Banner helped Nat. Cautiously, they investigated. They’d had the least to lose so they handled the loss best. Out of habit, they dove into work. Except this time work didn’t involve espionage, or killing, or smashing and it involved hopelessness. So much hopelessness.

Even Cap, ever the optimist, couldn’t bright-side his way out of this.

Carol was the savior. Though their introduction had been… rough (Nat had almost fought her when she’d appeared behind them) she’d happily taken up the mission to find Tony. Steve figured she was in the same position as the rest of them: she was looking for something to do-- something to fight 

There was a week between sending Carol back into space and having her return. It was one of the longest weeks of Steve’s life.

* * *

**Year One**

After killing Thanos they all split off. The man from Brooklyn went back to New York. The Mechanic moved to the country. The scientist went back to the lab. The king found a new land to rule. The double-crosser held down the fort.

The archer was nowhere to be found. 

Nebula and Rocket took Quill’s ship and tried to be a crew without a captain. It had taken them almost a month to get the ship back into working order. They’d thrown themselves into the work not realizing that once it was complete they would have nothing left to focus on. So they gave themselves a job: look for people to help. 

For once, Rocket didn’t need to argue about who was in charge. For once, he wanted to be challenged.

When Tony got married, none of the Avengers were invited to the service except Rhodes. Half of Pepper’s family came. Tony had Rhodes and Happy. Steve still sent a card and a gift. He’d promised to be there when Tony needed him. The offer still stood.

Steve didn’t learn that Pepper was pregnant until she’d already had the baby. He heard it from Nat, and he pretended that it didn’t hurt his feelings. Spies are excellent at knowing when someone is lying. Instead of letting on to this, she smiled and sent him baby pictures.

People started dying around the time Morgan was born. Criminals, gangs. Rhodes investigated it without telling Nat. The first few groups were killed by arrows. 

Clint still hadn’t answered any of their calls.

Nat refused to stop looking. She knew he was still alive, but she couldn’t back up her claim.

Around the time of the first killing Steve started his first support group. He was tired of not having anything to do. He was going stir-crazy in his apartment, and there were only so many times a week he could drive upstate without it looking suspicious. There were no more villains to fight. He thought about Sam: “What do we do, Cap?” 

The support group was a way to help people get back on their feet. He knew a thing or two about having life dramatically altered. He kept Peggy’s picture in his pocket and failed to follow his own advice twice a week.

He led therefore he was.

At least, that’s what it boiled down to.

Tony couldn’t stop inventing, even when there was no one to invent for. 

“What are you working on?” Pepper was holding Morgan in her arms. She’d just fallen asleep, and putting her down often led to a screaming fit. Tony was standing over his work table, arms crossed, jaw set. He was staring at the hologram: a mask with slanted, half-moon eyes.

“Something useless,” he told her. He closed the hologram, rubbed his eyes, and took Morgan with a pained smile. “Let’s try to get you to sleep in bed tonight, huh?”

Thor managed to find a town to settle down in. Actually, Valkyrie found the town. She also rehomed everyone and ran the docks. People took their grievances to her and tried not to ask too many questions about their king who spent most of his time locked in his home. More than once he had woken to a knock on his door to find Valkyrie on the other end.

 “No one blames you,” she’d promised.

“Come spar with me,” she’d offered.

“We all lost the fight. Stop moping about it-- your people need you.”

They didn’t need a king, they needed an anchor, so the king retreated and the anchor settled into the soft sand of the port.

Carol did the work that Rocket and Nebula couldn’t. She’d lost her crew in The Snap, but she refused to stop helping the planets that needed it. 

Unfortunately, not many planets needed it. Most of her leads were fake, or small, or manageable. There were no skrull invasions, no planet explosions. No more SOSs from Nick.

On Earth, New Years came and went, and Times Square didn’t even fill. High schools graduated and the chairs didn’t fill the football field. Life went on, but at 50%.

It was the same across the universe.

  



	2. Year Two

**Year Two**

On Morgan’s first birthday Pepper and Tony baked the cake themselves and laughed at the lopsided result. The Mechanic couldn’t operate an oven, or a hand mixer, and Morgan ran around the kitchen banging a pan with a spoon.

Pepper looked happy-- the fake kind of happy they’d all become accustomed to since the snap. The empty kind of happy.

Tony felt the sad kind of happy when he looked at Morgan, and he thought, out of nowhere, about how Peter should be graduating high school in a month. He thought about the scholarship he had been preparing for him so he could go to any school he wanted to without needing to worry about putting a strain on May financially. 

The paperwork for the scholarship sat, untouched, in the top drawer of his desk. 

“How about,” Tony said, chasing Morgan and scooping her into his arms, “We go to the store and pick up a cake because Mommy and I aren’t going to make a cake that’s edible.” 

Morgan, still giggling from being chased, wrapped her arms around Tony’s neck.

* * *

 

“I know a game,” Nebula said. “The Iron Man taught it to me.” She sat across from Rocket. He was perched on a chair. 

“You think what we need right now is a freaking game?” he asked. “We’re trying to find space pirates.”

Trying to find was a strong way to put it. They were actually sat in the void of space waiting to be  _attacked_ by space pirates.

“You’re a space pirate,” Nebula pointed out.

“I am  _ not  _ a pirate, I’m a thief. There’s a difference.” 

“Well, thief, there’s nothing we can do until they show up to plunder us. We might as well play a game.” 

Rocket groaned. “Alright, alright. What’s the game?” 

As it would turn out, Rocket got  _ very  _ into table football. They end up playing for hours. Rocket wins most of the games. 

“Your rodent hands are smaller,” Nebula said when Rocket tried to claim his superiority. “It’s an unfair advantage.” 

“My  _ what  _ hands?” Rocket demanded, and they squabbled until they both felt at home again.

* * *

 

Carol spent a lot of her free time staring at her pager and hoping it would send her an alert. 

She hadn’t talked to Nick since he’d given it to her, but the buzzing had sent alarm down her spine, and coming back to Earth to find him and everyone she knew gone… It made her feel alien. More alien than usual, and without Goose or the rest of her crew she felt lonely, and tired, and… She felt the way most of the Avengers looked. Every planet she went to was tired, and empty, and searching for an answer. Every time she explained they looked angry, and scared, and they demanded to know why she didn’t do more to help them.

She couldn’t think of a good way to say that she had lost a fight that wasn’t hers. How do you say, “we killed him” without also saying, “we fixed it”? They were asking the impossible. 

She hadn’t kept much in touch with the Avengers. Natasha requested updates, but they took time and Carol was too busy acting as an intergalactic PR associate to check in monthly. She delegated most of her jobs to the raccoon and his friend and continued hoping that Nick would send her another message.

* * *

Steve tried to see Nat as much as possible. Of all of them, she seemed the most lonely. She had taken claim of the compound while the rest of them went off and tried to live a life that was different-but-the-same as their old ones, and Steve could see the weight of it in her eyes. 

They ordered Chinese food and talked about anything but the obvious. Steve asked about Tony’s daughter. Nat asked about any cute girls Steve had met in the city. Steve didn’t mention Rhodes’s suspicions about Clint, or that there was really no point in running this operation, or that maybe Nat should find something that makes her as happy as doing good did.

Instead, he talked her into watching documentaries about all the time he had missed. 

“So  _ was  _ he sent by Russia?” Steve asked as the credits rolled on the documentary about Lee Harvey Oswald.

Nat only smiled.

In these brief moments, they almost felt okay again.

* * *

 

Bruce kept in touch, but only kind of. He spent a lot of time in the lab, he spent the rest of it trying to find out what had happened after Ultron. The years between then and finding Thor were still a blur. He talked to Valkyrie about it, mostly, but she spoke about it with regret.

* * *

 

Thor sat through at least 4 interventions before he finally told Valkyrie to take care of it all herself. 

He didn’t hear from her until he emerged again for alcohol. 

His people mourned. He noticed, but there was nothing he could do about it, so he drank a little more and he ignored the stares Valkyrie gave him, and eventually Korg stopped trying to cheer him up and let him live in his sadness and anger and regret.

Thor missed Heimdall. He even missed Loki, much to his own surprise. 

Tony had given him a phone before they parted. When the Avengers called, he hit the ignore button. This was his own, faulty way of being impenetrable the way Asgard had not been.

  
  



End file.
